I’ve drawn so much inspiration from all the photos of home bars posted on Tiki Central and I’m grateful for all the detailed information others have provided. After about 6 months of work, I finished our basement bar called the "Cosmic Coconut", although I don't think a good tiki bar is ever really finished. I hope you enjoy the photos and welcome your thoughts or suggestions. Future plans include coordinated thunder & lightning sound effects, more foliage, and eventually an outdoor tiki bar. But for now this space is going to help us get through another long western Massachusetts winter.

Mahalo!

So happy about finding this Witco bar on Craigslist and am paying homage to Elvis a little bit too...

Thank you all for the kind words and encouragement. The lighting has been a lot of fun to work with, I used LED strip under the bar, behind the bar, and behind the couch; we are frequently changing the colors to create different moods and looks in the bar.

Absolutely gorgeous! Every time I look at one of your pics I notice something new. Hope you took plenty of construction pics, we love that kind of thing around here. And agree about the lights, fantastic job

Thanks everyone! I seem to be doing this out of order, since I already posted the finished product above, I'll go ahead and post the pre-construction and construction photos here. I had to dig deep in my hard drive but found some, it's fun to look back, while I sit at the bar with a cocktail!

This first shot is looking from the stairs towards where the couch now sits (the basement was a mess!)...
This is more or less the same shot during construction...
Looking towards the wall with the Witco bar and artwork...
...during construction...
This couch is sitting where the bar stools now sit, I cut a big hole in that bedroom wall, which became the back-bar area...
So much fun!
Looking into the back-bar area...
The bar top is made of wood from pallets, it now has a nice shiny coat of polyurethane on it...

I'm going to dig around, I think have more photos somewhere for another post.

I appreciate all the feedback so far. Everything I know about building my tiki bar I learned right here at Tiki Central, so I'm very grateful to all of you who shared so generously and I'm eager to contribute to this community!

The lava rock wall is made of foam board, chicken wire, and expandable foam sealant. It's mostly painted black...
The skull is of an explorer caught in the lava flow...
This was seriously messy stuff, very difficult to control, trust me you don't want to get it on your hands!

I routed out a design for the door-way trim, then burned it with a propane torch, scraped it with a wire brush, and sealed with polyurethane...
The finished product...

The walls were painted brown then covered with burlap, 1" bamboo fencing topped with a chair rail...

That's some serious sweat equity, man! I can't imagine how much sawdust builds up in that confined area--I'm fortunate enough to have space outdoors where I can do my woodworking, and even then the air quickly gets choked with sawdust. Good job with the router, the end product looks nice!

On 2017-01-10 07:39, Prikli Pear wrote:That's some serious sweat equity, man! I can't imagine how much sawdust builds up in that confined area--I'm fortunate enough to have space outdoors where I can do my woodworking, and even then the air quickly gets choked with sawdust. Good job with the router, the end product looks nice!

Thank you! New England winters keep me from working outside, I think the sawdust was up to my ankles by the time I finished routing all the wood and I definitely had to stop periodically just to let it settle out of the air. I could taste it for days.